1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a teaching material processing apparatus, a teaching material processing method, and a teaching material processing program that processes an educational material used in an educational institute, and more particularly, to a teaching material processing apparatus, a teaching material processing method, and a teaching material processing program capable of performing marking on an educational material.
2. Background Art
In general, for example, an educational material, such as a paper test or an exercise sheep, is used in an educational institute, such as a school. That is, a student enters answers in answer fields corresponding to the answers on the educational material, and then a teacher marks the educational material having the answers entered therein.
Therefore, an easy marking process on the educational material has been strongly demanded. To meet the demand for the easy marking process, for example, a system has been proposed in which a marking table and a marking pen are connected to a personal computer (hereinafter, referred to as a ‘PC’), and symbols ‘◯’ and ‘x’ are entered in the educational material loaded at a predetermined position on the marking table by using the marking pen to input position information of the answers entered on the educational material and correct/incorrect answer information to the PC, thereby performing automatic marking on the answers entered in the educational material by using the PC (for example, see JP-A-6-266278.).
However, in the marking process of the educational material, it is not necessarily preferable that dedicated components, such as the marking table and the marking pen, be provided. The reason is that the dedicated components cause the overall structure of a system to be complicated and an increase in manufacturing costs thereof. In addition, when the dedicated components are used, the educational material which can correspond thereto is limited, which causes generality for the educational material to be deteriorated.
In recent years, a PC, a duplicating machine, or a multifunction machine having a scanning function, a printing function, and a network communication function has been generally provided in the educational institutes.
Therefore, in the marking process of the educational material, a reading process is performed on an educational material having correct/incorrect answer determining figures, such as ‘◯’ and ‘x’, entered therein by using the scanning function of, for example, a duplicating machine, and image processing is performed on image data, which is the read result, by using the image processing function of, for example, a PC. In this way, it is possible to automatically mark answers entered in the educational material, without using specific components. More specifically, when the image data is acquired from the educational material, correct/incorrect answer determining contents are extracted from the image data to perform point totaling on the correct/incorrect answer determining contents entered in the educational material. In addition, the contents entered in the educational material by an answerer are extracted from the image data, and the specification of the answerer is performed by using an OCR (optical character reader) technique to associate the point totaled result with the answerer specification result, thereby automatically obtaining the same marked result as that disclosed in the above-mentioned patent publication.
Therefore, in the above-mentioned marking process of the educational material, the correct/incorrect answer determining contents should be extracted, and the distribution of points for the correct/incorrect answer determination, that is, points distributed to questions should be recognized. When the points distributed to each question is not known, the point totaling cannot be performed. Therefore, in order to perform the point totaling on the educational material, information for specifying points distributed to each question (hereinafter, referred to as ‘distributed point information’) is needed. That is, in the marking process of the educational material, it is necessary to prepare the distributed point information on each answer field on the educational material.
However, in general, a plurality of questions and answer fields corresponding thereto are arranged on the educational material, and points distributed to the questions are different from each other. In addition, various types of entry fields exist on the educational field according to subjects or grades of students.
Therefore, when the distributed point information is manually input to a system or apparatus for performing a marking process by a user for the system or apparatus, the structure of the system or apparatus becomes very complicated, and operational errors can easily occur. Thus, this method is not preferable.